(Published in Business Day – 20 August 2024)
As I was preparing this column I received the utterly shocking and devastating news that the chief developer in a small company I am associated with had suffered a sudden heart attack and passed away.
Gone.
It’s a personal tragedy for her lovely, close, adventurous family who have lost their mother and wife. It’s a personal tragedy too for many friends and colleagues who loved her and enjoyed her cheerful, relaxed and always helpful approach to life.
Her death is also a business tragedy for a small South African company with four full time staff and some contractors. Larger companies can and should have succession plans to cover key appointments like this, but small companies have just one or two people covering each function.
Life brings these sudden reminders that nothing can be taken for granted. We have to plan for the known and live ready for the unknown.
What lessons are there in this for a business owner or manager? We respond both as businesspeople and as human beings.
At the practical business level, in the short term we need to put aside our personal grief and act very quickly to notify all who need to know; to identify the implications for customers and mitigate the impact on them without delay; to assign colleagues to cover essential responsibilities; and to reassure the team that these steps are in place, and to ask them to step up as needed.
In the longer term we need to prepare as well as we can for unforeseen losses, whether by natural attrition of key staff leaving or the unnatural intervention of sudden illness, accident or death. Even small companies can ensure that playbooks capture the necessary steps in core processes, and all customer, supplier and project information is updated and maintained in a format and place accessible by colleagues.
We are fortunate that this colleague left a two-page contingency document indicating where everything is, and she lodged the passwords with two people. A disaster is compounded when information is stored on private hard drives or behind passwords only the missing person knows. If you’re a manager, check this today!
At the human level we have a responsibility to the person’s family, to our colleagues and to ourselves. In the case of a sudden death like this, the family may need very practical help in accessing company-sponsored insurance and pension or other resources. And emotionally they will be craving any stories and tributes that colleagues can offer that describe the one they love.
Similarly, colleagues will want time to gather, reflect and honour the person. Coping with the business implications may make this an overwhelmingly busy and stressful time, but as caring human beings we owe it to our fellow humans to take the time to honour their grief and anxiety.
That puts extra pressure on ourselves. Coming to terms with mortality is a matter for religion more than management, but we need to do this work in preparation for whatever life may throw at us. In the crisis we put aside our vulnerability and focus on what has to be done. We postpone our weakness until later when we can return to it. But if we don’t then take time to deal with loss as soon as is possible, we store up emotional pressures that can sink us in future losses, or blunt our ability to be fully ourselves even in ordinary times.
When disaster strikes, the leader is the one person who cannot collapse. Everyone else depends on the leader for strength and reassurance. If you have not yet faced and come to terms with your own mortality, and the certainty of losing others closest to you, now is a good time to get to work on it.
Jonathan Cook is a psychologist and director of companies. He chairs Thornhill Associates.